Private Like Clockwork

[Darth Virelia]

"Negotiations."

Tags - War Marshal Helix



The room was a monolith in silence. No light but what was necessary. No sound but the distant thrum of machines too old to remember what they were powering. No scent save the antiseptic sterility that marked all of Polis Massa's lower tiers—levels never meant for life, only function.

Darth Virelia stood alone in the meeting chamber.

The walls were seamless obsidian-plasteel, polished to such a fine sheen that they reflected only suggestions of her shape—never the full truth. The overhead lights, minimal and cold, cast no shadow. That was by design. The shadows on Polis Massa did not belong to the light.

She had chosen this place precisely for its austerity.

Not the throne rooms of industry. Not the fractured temple ruins where secrets bled from stone. Not the Geonosian foundries where her dreams of mechanized sovereignty hissed into being beneath fire and wire.

No.

This place was sterile.

Dead.

Honest.

The air here was weighed down by silence. But not emptiness. That silence had pressure. It wasn't absence—it was anticipation. The kind of stillness that comes before a body exhales, before a scalpel touches skin, before a mind breaks.

Virelia stood at the head of a long, narrow table of matte durasteel, her hands folded neatly behind her back. She wore no armor, only a sleek, high-collared bodysuit of synthsilk layered beneath a tailored mantle of black and violet. Still imposing, still inhuman, but stripped of the myth and menace that cloaked her in the field. Her hair was tied in a golden twist behind her helm, which sat dormant at her side, faceless and waiting.

She had not summoned Helix out of necessity.

No, necessity was a weakness for lesser beings.

She had summoned him because he was the only one she could not predict.

And that intrigued her.

Their last venture into the ancient depths of Geonosis had yielded more than just machinery. It had yielded potential. Something old, yes—but also something useful. And usefulness, to Virelia, was the highest form of worship. A being like Helix, for all his obscenities of form and fragmented contempt for organics, had proven that he understood this.

She respected him for it. Genuinely. In the same way one respected a blade sharp enough to draw blood without effort.

He was a machine without chains.

And she, a sovereign without gods.

But that alliance… it could fracture at any time.

She needed to see him again. Not to command. Not even to sway. But to measure.

Because there was something on the horizon now. A shape forming behind the veil of the Velgrath, behind the pageantry of imperial succession and the petty squabbles of Sith factions clinging to the delusion of cohesion. Something that required more than soldiers and starships.

Something that required intellect. Will. Design.

Helix could be an asset in that future. Or a threat. It remained unclear which path he would choose. And Virelia was far too strategic to leave variables unaccounted for. Especially not ones that could rewrite the script entirely.

A low chime pulsed through the floor—the only sign that the invitation had reached its recipient. Whether Helix would answer it was another matter entirely.

She waited.

Still as death.
Composed as ice.
Burning beneath the skin.

Her gaze never flickered to the sealed door. Her posture remained pristine, spine straight, lips unmoving. But the air around her began to shift—an imperceptible distortion of pressure, of presence. Her command of the Force did not boil or crackle. It did not flare in theatrical shows of hatred.

It compressed. Like gravity on a dying star. Like inevitability given form.

If Helix arrived, he would not be greeted with pageantry or flattery. He would find her precisely as she was.

Waiting.

Unblinking.

A sovereign in mourning for a galaxy not yet dead, but already hers.

 

[War Marshal Helix]

Helix hadn't been to Polis Massa in a very long while. There was seldom any reason to go, after all. A chain of floating asteroids with no atmosphere was of little use to him, on most days. Little worth plundering, and even less worth seeing.

Until he received the call.

Darth Virelia wasn't kept waiting long. A small, sleek vessel snapped out of hyperspace above the asteroid cluster. Helix was pleased to see that it hadn't changed much, at least at first glance. Some things in the galaxy were born worthless, and stayed worthless. In this highly-chaotic and turmoil-filled era, it was nice to know that some things stayed the same.

That pleasant sense of stability didn't last. He very much doubted this was a social call. People didn't tend to invite him to dinners, parties, and wine tastings, and for good reason. Serina had something important to bother him with, or she would not have called.

Helix lost no time in making planetfall. When he did, he observed that the chain wasn't quite so dead as it appeared from orbit. Serina had been busy, building the place up into her own personal little rat's nest. A shame that such talent was wasted in improving a ball of rock.

He had still not decided what to do with Calis. The Tsis'kaar were not admirers, as one might expect. Not after the death of Fury. Helix did not share such concerns. As likely as not, he'd do nothing. He was content to let most of the Order's little schemers and powerbrokers alone, in the end.

His power was not yet so insecure that he deemed everyone outside of his grip a threat. So far, his strategy of carefully balancing cordial relations with most of the Sith, despite their endless internal power struggles, had worked. He'd not allowed any of them to draw him into open conflict with another, despite numerous rigorous attempts by some of them. Logically, it could not last forever.

"The center cannot hold." He murmured to himself, right before he opened the doors to Calis' meeting room. It was sparse, sterile. More like a hospital than a castle. He'd expected animal hide rugs, gold chandeliers, the works.

Maybe Serina still had some surprises in store for him. If the center could not hold, then in the end, he was on his own side. What else was new. What was best for Helix was all that mattered, at the end of the day, and that could change by the hour. When the chips were down and the bullets flying, he cared about three things, in descending order of importance. Himself, a few close allies, and giving this rotten little galaxy the wakeup call it needed to break from stagnation.

He'd see what Calis had for him, and prioritize his response based on that.

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Negotiations."

Tags - War Marshal Helix



The door slid open with a soft hiss, and silence folded itself around the intrusion like a waiting breath.

Darth Virelia did not move.

She stood precisely where she had been, the same solitary silhouette poised at the head of the room's singular table—neither welcoming nor cold. The light caught her eyes as Helix entered, casting two razor lines of violet across her cheekbones, though her expression remained unreadable. Her lips parted, but not to greet. Not yet.

Instead, she regarded him.

All of him.

Not the humanoid frame he wore like a disguise, nor the polymorphic flesh that housed a hive mind built from godless calculus—but the thing inside. The chaos pretending at civility. The intelligence that could shatter a city just to see how the pieces fell.

He had come. That was more than most did.

"Helix," she said finally. The sound was a velvet razor—soft, measured, inevitable. Not quite invitation. Not quite approval. But something that lived between them like a pact neither had yet signed.

"I imagine you found the journey here unpleasant."

A pause. She didn't smile, but her voice curved like it almost could.

"Polis Massa is unkind to those with delusions of comfort. That is its charm."

She gestured—barely a flick of her taloned hand—toward the seat opposite hers. The only other one in the room. "Sit, or don't. I don't require it. This isn't a negotiation. It's… observation."

She finally turned her body to face him, slow and sinuous. Without her armor, she was less a war goddess and more a high priestess of some forgotten, elegant heresy—elegant and precise. Her synthsilk mantle whispered as she moved, trailing just enough crimson threading to remind any viewer that her softness was a performance. One she controlled entirely.

"I have little interest in preamble," she said, circling toward her side of the table again, voice like perfume curling around the end of a knife. "You are not a man who values it. Nor am I."

She placed a small, slate datapad on the table's edge.

It did not light up.

"I summoned you because something is unfolding. A shape on the edge of the horizon. You may already sense it, even if you haven't named it."

Her gaze lingered on him now, violet and unblinking.

"The Velgrath."

She let the word breathe for a moment—quiet and heavy as a secret whispered into the void.

Her voice was softer now, almost reverent. "You could be a blade in the dark. A wedge. A lever. A fracture. Or—if you wished it—a fulcrum."

She moved no closer, asked no questions.

Instead, she tilted her head—something between curiosity and indulgence—and her tone dipped, low and intimate as a secret:

"I do so admire useful things."

And for the first time, just barely, she smiled. Not mockery. Not seduction. Something quieter. Something rarer.

Something like respect.

 

[War Marshal Helix]

Helix regarded her with his usual scalpel gaze. Two monsters, sizing one another up.

"To the contrary, I found it most restful. Then again, my scale for what constitutes discomfort is rather more... expansive than that of most."

Helix slid into the offered seat more as a courtesy than anything else. Sitting, standing, both were of approximately the same level of comfort to him. He was long past the point of having a servo structure that could appreciate the value of inactivity.

His stare never wavered. Helix's manner was usually a sort of restrained violence, coupled with outward cool politeness and a dash of culinary appraisal. As if he could not quite decide whether to vivisect, observe, or simply devour what was in front of him. He'd taken quite a liking to the latter since their last meeting, when he'd absorbed that unfortunate scavenger on Geonosis. He needed no nutrition, as such, but could easily form the necessary sensory organs to appreciate a meal when called for.

No meal was sweeter, he'd found, than the terror of a victim being eaten alive at the molecular level.

"Most who observe me are appropriately frightened, Lady Calis. I think that's what I like most about you. Your pulse doesn't even rise."

With the greetings out of the way, he pondered her next words. In truth, he'd paid only languid attention to the Emperor's absurd little beauty pageant so far. He had wars to win, plunder to take, and projects to complete. Both left little time for the consideration of new legions outside the one he held his post in. Still, he supposed he knew where this was going.

"I'm certain you've been scuttling around and whispering in all the correct ears already." He replied, his oddly-modulated graveyard rasp filling the room. "From what little mind I have paid, I am looking at the new Imperator of the Fourth. I suppose pre-congratulations are in order." His tone, surprisingly, was a sort of sincerely cheerful praise. "Unless... you are implying that some doubt yet remains as to the outcome."

A probing question, one both of them knew the answer to. He was here for a reason, after all, or so he hoped.

"I am all of these things already, Lady Calis. And far more. But I suspect you didn't call me here today to stare at me like I am a Nexu in a cage. You want something. What can I do for you on this fine, airless evening on a barren rock?"

This sort of informal familiarity was something he enjoyed with few others. For better or worse, each of them knew exactly who and what they were looking at. He knew what she wanted, or suspected he did. Several parties in the Order plucked at his heels these days, desperately trying to tug him into their circle. Lines were being drawn, and those outside them pulled in every which direction. He was not a factor that could be nudged this way and that like a leaf in the wind, however.

At least part of his commentary was sincere. Darth Virelia had been by far the most active and aggressive candidate, at least so far as his very limited observations had seen. What use had she for him?

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Negotiations."

Tags - War Marshal Helix



Virelia did not answer right away.

Silence was her ally, not Helix's. It coiled between them—velvet and viscous, just enough weight behind it to press on the skin. She let it stretch, as if measuring how much oxygen he'd consume before she gave him the next breath.

Only then, only once his words had fully settled, did she move again.

A single step forward.

Not toward him. Toward inevitability.

"You are correct," she said, at last—softly, like one admitting a beautiful sin. "I do not fear you."

She let the statement linger. Not challenge, not praise. A simple truth that tasted like incense and static.

"There is no need to congratulate me. Not yet. I do not win things," she said, folding her hands behind her back, "I make them obsolete. The Velgrath will not crown me. It will end—when it serves me to end it."

She turned slightly, angular and elegant, casting her gaze toward the black glass viewport that stared out into the dead void between asteroids. The shadows there did not move, yet the light seemed to bend toward her regardless.

"What I want from you is influence," she said plainly.

Then, quieter.

"And what I offer is relevance."

Her voice did not rise or press—it suggested, like a hand gently placed at the nape of a neck.

"The others will come to you. Of course they will. They already are. They speak of destiny and purity and conquest. They flatter, threaten, bluster."

She looked at him then, violet eyes sharp as moonlight on obsidian.

"I don't need to sell myself to you, Helix. You're not a buyer. You are a climate. One does not convince the wind to blow. One prepares for the direction it's already turning."

She paused again, more deliberate this time.

"You've seen the others. You've seen what they bring to bear. Morta, Strosius, their ilk. Passionate. Driven. But small. Always small. They will try to drag you into their little storms. Offer you incentives. Appeal to your factional ties."

She inclined her head, just slightly.

"I don't need you to kneel. I need you to… float. Near me. Not bound. Not leashed. Simply proximate. Close enough to tilt the board."

Her tone, while still formal, dipped in temperature. A glimmer of something warm beneath the chill.

"I would prefer to win with you watching. It's cleaner."

Another step forward. Not closer to him—just forward, as if forward was the only direction she ever truly walked.

"You are correct. You are all of those things already. Blade, fulcrum, fracture. But I wonder if you are tired of being wielded."

Her voice dipped, like a secret pulled between silk sheets.

"I suspect you'd rather be the hand."

 

[War Marshal Helix]

"How unfortunate, then, that influence is not in my power to give." responded the colony, a note of something entering his tone. Like the low hum of a feline predator when it has already caught its prey, and is simply having fun before the meal. "At least, political influence. There are other ways to divert currents to your will."

"And that relevance, as defined by this crumbling little empire, is of no value to me. I am the carrion beast snapping at the bones they leave behind. Oft disregarded, but always appreciated when he turns his jaws elsewhere." Helix idly studied his left hand, reshaping it in rapid succession. Three fingers. Four. Five. Six. A crab-like claw. A jagged blade. A fine scalpel. A writhing nest of cilia.

"Ever the flatterer, Ms. Calis." He said, ceasing his protean dallying to waggle one finger at her in a tone of mocking condemnation. The comparison to unstoppable, ever-changing, and reasonless forces of natural destruction was an apt one, and he found it amusing. "And ever the astute observer. I must say you figured me out more quickly and more thoroughly than any other."

"The rest, however, can no more drag me into their orbit than you can arm-wrestle a summa-verminoth. If they could, they wouldn't need to ask. They could simply make me. Nothing rankles a Sith's pride quite like being forced to beg and cajole, and nothing makes him more uncomfortable than someone or something outside of his control. While I cannot challenge some of them directly, my aid to their enemies at a crucial moment may spell their end. They know this, of course. Once again, ever the astute observer. You needn't concern yourself with me or my pliability."

Then his tone changed, from a sort of blandly firm reassurance to mock surprise. "Why, I thought I already did float beside you. It is not in my custom to answer summons personally, yet for you I have done so twice. I do not afford that privilege to many. I do have an interstellar army to direct, plunder to seize, and boundaries to shatter, after all."

Her last statement, however, prompted a chuckle from the colony. Or at least, it prompted a hideous, staccato scraping sound, like gravel sliding into an open grave.

"Ah, clever as you are, that's the one thing you still don't understand, Ms. Calis. I throw my weight around to all these seemingly random little causes not out of obligation, or fear, or anything so gauche as pity. I do it out of curiosity, and because there is nothing more delightful than seeing the despised, the underappreciated, and the misplaced cause trouble to the stagnant oafs above them. I suppose sympathy would be the closest word. We outsiders do have to stick together, after all."

"My other little friends have their virtues, but that does not mean I appreciate yours any less. Be thankful that few others have the wit to see them. It will make your victory all the sweeter."

Once again, the waggling tut-tut gesture with one finger.

"If facilitating the fates of others isn't the action of a hand, I fail to see what is. My own ambitions are a little more..." he paused as if searching for the word.

"Tactile. Simple. Scholarly. And as I told you in that little tomb on Geonosis, I suspect you've nothing to offer me to accomplish them. I'm open to being proven wrong, of course. You've certainly proven beyond resourceful up until now, but that can be discussed later." He scratched the table in front of him idly, that same fidgeting gesture he used whenever seated. He gave Darth Virelia a curt nod.

"I have aided you for free, because I like your spirit, and because I can. An alien concept in Sith space, but perhaps that's why I've been so successful. My way of thinking is frankly beyond the understanding of almost anyone inside the Blackwall. In some ways, so is your own."

"If you wish for me to observe your statistically-likely victory, then I see no reason to deny you. Unless there is a 'but' hanging in the air at the end of this proposition."

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Negotiations."

Tags - War Marshal Helix



Virelia did not move as he spoke.

She only watched—cool, still, with the slight tilt of her head that might have been amusement, or assessment, or simply the indulgent curiosity of a woman studying a serpent mid-coil. She let the whole tirade wash over her like ritual incense, inhaling the cadence, not just the content.

It wasn't disrespect she showed him in her silence. It was fascination.

When he finally finished—when the table bore the faint scars of his idle scrawl and the air between them still vibrated faintly with the aftermath of his laughter—she stepped forward, slow and measured. Her boots made no sound on the immaculate floor.

"If I did not think you already floated beside me," she said, "you would not be here."

It was not flattery. Not even gratitude. It was a statement of functional truth—clean, precise, and entirely unadorned.

"But I do not intend to float. I intend to crash through."

Her tone remained soft, though there was something more now beneath it. A tension, subtle as a drawn wire beneath silk. Her fingers brushed the edge of the table—the one he'd scratched—and she traced his gouges with one pale nail, almost absentmindedly.

"This is a ritual. You know that. Not a contest. Not truly. A theater of triumph before the real knives come out. The Emperor has called for blood, and so we bleed. But if the Velgrath is a pageant, it will be I who rips down the curtain. I intend to make it real."

She met his gaze fully, now.

Not challenging.

But lit with something akin to reverence.

"Strosius will bring insanity, Morta will bring madness. I will bring clarity. Control. Something they cannot counterfeit. Something the Order has not seen since Carnifex wore a crown."

She circled the table slowly, her presence never intrusive—just ambient. Like gravity.

"You've no need for relevance as they define it, I agree. But I do not define it as they do. The Emperor has called the faithful to war. But the wise understand: war does not begin on the battlefield. It begins in silence. It begins in the mind. It begins with people like you."

She stopped a pace behind him.

"You call your aims simple. Tactile. Scholarly. That's what I admire most."

Her voice curled low, velvet dragged across smoldering coals.

"I have no desire to make you a political creature, Helix. I want your doctrine. Your savagery, when needed. Your force of will. When the Velgrath begins, I want your war machines beside mine. I want the shadow of your command looming behind me when I rise. Not to frighten my enemies."

She leaned slightly closer. A breath's width behind his shoulder.

"But to remind my allies that I am the one who persuaded you."

There was no seduction in her nearness. No plea in her poise. It was the intimacy of weapons laid side by side.

A final truth, wrapped in silk and sharpened to a point.

"You say you've aided me for free," she murmured, pulling back, "but even the wind shapes mountains. Even entropy leaves fingerprints. You have shaped this. Already."

Then she returned to her place. Took her seat once more like it was a throne carved into the bones of the room.

There was no but.

There was only the storm ahead, and the question of which gods would ride it.

 

[War Marshal Helix]

"There's that 'but' I was expecting." Responded the colony, accompanied by the familiar chitter-rasp of malicious amusement. "Ritual has its uses, but ritualizing something as elementary as competition is... so disappointingly Sith-like. Either kill your rivals, or do not."

His triple-eyed gaze flickered thoughtfully. "Yes, dear Strosius. I am fond of the boy, his obvious and manifold personality flaws aside. I have no interest in undermining him at this time, as he does a fine enough job of that himself. If you wish him removed from the Kaggath, it will not be by my hand. Nor will I directly act against him."

"My public policy towards the entire mess is one of neutrality. Privately, however, I am as willing to facilitate chaos as ever. If you want war machines, you will have them, or what elements I can pull away from the Shattermarch and this debacle with the Imperials."

"Call it insurance, call it sentiment. Perhaps it is a little of both. I believe myself entitled to either." He tilted his head in a curiously avian manner. "Of course, I share no such sentimentality with any of the rest, but decorum demands what decorum demands. If the situation allowed it, most of the Order would be more useful as worm food."

Helix didn't name any names, but it wouldn't take a genius to figure it out. He was only ever seen much in the company of a few. Darth Virelia was one of them.

"For what it is worth, that courtesy flows both ways. You've made some very powerful enemies, at least a couple of which have tried to nudge my blade toward your own heart. I told them the same thing I have told you. I will happily hand you the gun, but you'll pull the trigger yourself."

As if to illustrate, a portion of his surface fluctuated, forming into a seemingly-functional slugthrower. He pointed it at his own temple with an empty click, then reabsorbed it.

"I can offer no higher courtesy to another than a hesitance to kill them. This is an unfortunate incident where my priorities cross paths."

He folded his hands across the table, ceasing his fidgeting for a moment and adopting an apologetic tone of ambiguous sincerity. "Such is the curse of responsibility. As a governor, I'm sure you understand. Resources are tight, times are hard, and what else do we have but our friends, in the end?" He was telling the truth in part, at least. The Velgrath was, in his mind, a settled affair, but he still had a need to keep the "New Emperor" on side.

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Negotiations."

Tags - War Marshal Helix



Virelia watched him. With the kind of poise that made predators hesitate, not because they feared—no, never that—but because they sensed the elegance in restraint. She listened as the words spilled from Helix's ever-shifting form, as though she were being told a parable in some forgotten cathedral, its bricks made from old blood and the ambitions of dead gods.

Only when his demonstration ended—his self-aimed slugthrower and its chiding click—did she finally break the silence.

"No higher courtesy," she murmured, "than the promise that your hand will not pull."

Her smile was slow and surgical. "Then I accept your courtesy, Helix. Not with gratitude—gratitude is for gifts undeserved. But with appreciation. That is what you offered. That is what I return."

She leaned back in her chair, one leg folding across the other with stately precision, the deep violet silk of her inner robes catching the sterile light like the glint of something poisonous.

"You misunderstand me only slightly," she added after a pause, voice smooth as lacquered sin. "I do not want Strosius removed from the Velgrath. I want him present. Bleeding. Unhinged. Screaming. I want him to fail—not vanish."

Her hand lifted, idly brushing back a strand of black hair that did not need to be moved.

"I want the mess. The spires of the Order may crack from the chaos, but what grows from the ruins will be stronger. Cleaner. Sharper. The Velgrath is not a contest of blood. It's a mirror. I simply want to make sure they all see their reflections clearly before I smash the glass."

She studied him again.

"You have your loyalties. So do I. But I find no contradiction in keeping them in tension. Sentiment is not weakness. It is selection. It is knowing which variables are worth preserving."

There was a gleam behind her words now—one that Helix, for all his polymorphic philosophy, would recognize. Not manipulation. Not some half-buried plea or seductive feint.

But conviction. Stripped bare. Iridescent and terrifying.

"I do not need your loyalty," she said simply. "I need your disruption. I need your machines to remind the others that war is not poetry—it is logistics. Steel. Fire. I need your ghosts to haunt their assumptions."

She uncrossed her legs. Her hands folded gently across her lap.

"And you will have something in return, even if you claim you require nothing. Perhaps not now. Perhaps not tomorrow. But I am a creature who keeps her ledgers tidy. One day, you will find yourself with a need. And I will meet it."

Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly.

"Not because I must. But because I said I would."

The room fell still again. Sterile. Silent. Timeless.

And then—soft, subtle, sincere:

"We do what we must, Helix. We wear the masks, we split the atom, we tear out our hearts so others can see what beats beneath. They see monstrosity. You and I see machinery. Pattern. Code."

She rose.

"Now, ready for my next proposal, something a bit more, chaotic?"